Flyers' Couturier recovering from abdominal surgery

Summary of 2 articles · Updated Jun 11, 2014

The cover of Sports Illustrated this week announces the NHL’s return to that most coveted of all states: hotness. The league has reached this scorching status for, presumably, the first time since 1994, when the cover on which this week’s issue riffs That… (more) June a brutal NBA Finals between the Knicks and the Rockets had basketball fans missing the dominant Bulls. But then, as now, Broadway’s own Rangers were in the Stanley Cup Final; then, as now, the NHL was in the midst of kvelling about its lively postseason and the triumph of its Sun Belt expansion strategy. SI reasoned that the NBA’s stature would continue to shrink in Michael Jordan’s absence while a generation of fans nursed on Gretzky, and the Mighty Ducks movies would grow up loving hockey and not basketball.